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Uncovering the Family

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Watching “The Secret Life of Mountain Lions” was an unexpected pleasure. It gave me a window into the maternal life of a family and allowed me to see them as more than something and a predator of farm animals or something to be feared. Growing up in a farming community of Colorado tainted or colored my view of animals like the mountain lion, wolf, coyote or bears. These were animals that farmers and ranchers competed with and in turn, had a view that was far from the family depicted in the video. Clearly mountain lions are simply attempting to live their lives and raise their young as best they can. The odds are already stacked against them given the challenges of finding food, enduring harsh weather and simply surviving that first year. Unfortunately, the interface and interaction with humans has further impacted this species in a negative way. Human greed in the form of trophy hunting, greed in the form of killings to protect cattle or eliminate fear from territory encroach...
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Life From the Flames

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As we travel a few months deeper into our local fire season the signs of fire are around us. We experience glowing orange sunsets, tinted from smoke in the air from fires nearby. We hear airplanes buzzing overhead and as we look up we see the tell tail orange swath on the belly of the fire planes above. We read of evacuations, lost homes and fires growing to astronomic size. In the midst of all this is there any way we could see a fire as beneficial? Fire can actually be beneficial and fire is in fact a key component to the life cycle of the giant Sequoia trees. Sequoias actually rely on fire to help them release and deposit their seed to ensure the trees can reproduced into the future. Did you know? Sequoias have the thickest bark of any tree in existence. It can reach 2 feet or more at the base of the tree. This thickness prevents the heat from reaching the interior of the tree Sequoias cones actually need fire to allow the cones to release the seeds protected by t...
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Fueling the Fire - The Bark Beetle Dilemma

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Bark beetles are a natural pest that are part of a natural ecosystem when populations are maintained. The beetles bore through the bark of trees and deposit their eggs under the tree’s bark. After hatching, the larva feed on the tree bark as they continue to tunnel into the tree.  The beetles continue to grow and reproduce to continue their life cycle. The boring of the beetle eventually cuts off the circulation of the trees killing it where it stands. Trees aren’t helpless in all of this as their sap can act as a barrier to these beetles. Unfortunately, sap levels in trees are not substantial enough to act as a barrier when trees are stressed or living in conditions that aren’t ideal for their growing requirements. Years of drought in California have left our trees vulnerable to infestation by bark beetles. This ideal environment for the beetles has allowed populations to explode and in turn, infestations have grown across California. Trees that are infested with bark be...
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Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

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Photo courtesy of : http://roberthodgin.com/portfolio/work/into-the-trees/ Watching the short documentary titled “Seeing the Forest” drives home the perspective that we (society) see all our natural resources as being ours for the taking. We could be speaking of our water resources, our land or maybe our fish or other land animals. What we fail to recognize is our short term withdrawal has wide spread and long standing implications on the environmental webs in our ecosystem. The Siuslaw National Forest is one such web that society impacted over the previous 40 or more years. The forests of the Siuslaw area were decimated over time in part by clear cutting and irresponsible or uninformed logging practices. Trees play a vital role in our environmental web that go far beyond their role in absorbing carbon, stabilizing our soils or providing important habitat for birds and other animals. The influence and impact on trees branches out into other areas of our ecosystems like st...
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The Secrets of Salmon

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https://www.crd.bc.ca/about/what-is-crd This week I watched a video titled The Life Cycle of Salmon  and it proved to be an insightful topic. It provided me with a quick summary of the different stages a salmon encounters during their lifetime. The six stages discussed are as follows:  1. Fertilized egg stage – Every salmon starts out as an egg in a gravel bed in a freshwater river or creek. These eggs will “incubate” for a certain amount of time depending on the type of salmon and the temperature of the water. 2. Sac Fry stage – Once the egg hatches, the salmon enters the yolk stage. These fish are small and remain in the gravel beds safe from predators. Salmon at this point have a yolk sac attached to their bodies and that sac feeds them until they enter the next stage. 3. Fingerling stage – This stage begins once the salmon leaves the gravel beds where they were born. How long a salmon stays in the fry stage depends on the species – some are only there fo...
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Kicking the Bottle

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Go ahead…admit it…I had too. If you looked in your car, your fridge or your “recycling” bin would you find a water bottle? As I type this blog I sit across from a fancy aluminum double walled 24 ounce Takeya water bottle that has become my reliable side kick as of late. With that said, I could probably still dig up one of those embarrassing plastic bottles in one of the sources noted above. The good news I can report is I am starting to feel the same level of shame when I buy bottled water that I feel when I have to purchase a paper bag at Trader Joe’s because I left my reusable bags in the car. I was a bottled water user, but I have made the personal transition. As an individual and as a society we are easily influenced. We are influenced by fear, by the hope of what might be or maybe just by erroneous information. We fall victim to that influence in many places in our lives and buying water is just one of those places. Why on earth would we pay for something that we can get fo...
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Compost to Soil

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     We all undoubtedly have that green bin sitting on the side of our house. Maybe yours is a green dumpster. You might even have your own composting process at home. For those that live in the urban setting, their yard waste does go to a composting facility. Materials such as leaves, grass, branches, food and food soaked paper can be turned to something useful for vineyard owners, commercial growers or even the household gardener.      These waste categories collected in Marin, Sonoma and Alameda Counties eventually end up at the processing/composting center in Novato. The Novato center receives 450 tons of green material each day that is eventually turned into 3000 tons of processed composting material each month.      To get it processed the green material is dumped by the arriving trucks onto an asphalt pad. This material is loaded into large grinders to be ground to smaller bits.   This ground material is pi...
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